Software COVERAGE FROM AROUND THE WEB
Tobii peripheral adds an eye-tracking interface to any Windows 8 computer through a USB port, but the company's only offering 5,000 units before the end of the year.The accessory attaches to the base of your laptop screen or monitor, and tracks the movement of your eyes.Whatever you may feel about
Windows 8, it's sparked a number of interesting hybrid designs. Now you can count the Tobii Rex, an eye-controlled interface for Windows 8, as another innovation that works with Microsoft's latest operating system.
First seen at last year's
CES, the Rex is an eye-tracking peripheral that works with Tobii's proprietary Gaze interface to navigate around a Windows 8 computer. The stick-like device attaches to the base of your computer screen and connects via a USB port. Although the Rex enables users to perform tasks such as scrolling, Tobii says it's not meant to replace your keyboard or mouse. The company seems to be rolling out the Rex gradually; it's only offering 5,000 units before the end of the year. Tobii hasn't announced the price or availability for the device, though a special developer edition is now available at $995.
REDWOOD CITY -- Even as Oracle (ORCL) begins to reap the benefits of its move into cloud-based software, it continues to add to its portfolio through acquisitions, announcing the purchase of Eloqua for more than $800 million Thursday.Eloqua's cloud-based suite of marketing applications will "will become the centerpiece" of a new Oracle offering designed for marketing companies and departments, Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of development at Oracle, said in Thursday's announcement. The software giant agreed to pay $23.50 a share for the Virginia-based company, which Oracle said would mean a commitment of $871 million; the company sold shares for $11.50 in its August initial public offering in August and closed Wednesday at $17.92, giving the price a premium of 31.1 percent.Oracle has been forcefully pushing into software as a service, or SaaS, through acquisitions for more than a year, beginning with the $1.5 billion purchase of RightNow Technologies in October 2011, which preceded the purchase of Dublin-based Taleo for $1.9 billion. The Redwood City software giant used those companies to roll out a suite of cloud services for different industries earlier this year, and its efforts began to show fruit earlier this week, when Oracle announced its most recent quarter produced a 17 percent
2012 was an interesting one for Human Resources software. From Talent Management, Payroll, Analytics, HRMS and other niche HR solutions, there were a number of cool innovations, emerging trends and a lot of M&A with a side order of an IPO.You couldn’t swing a dead cat at the recent HR Technology show without hitting an HR sales rep hawking their firm’s HR analytics functionality. While most everyone claimed to have something, the depth of the solutions varied significantly. Most vendors’ offerings were very new extensions of their traditional reporting tools. If there was any ‘insight’ to be gained from these initial tools, it only happened because the vendor finally connected performance and compensation data together. The real stars in analytics were analytics only vendors like Visier, Evolv-OnDemand and Talent Analytics.Relevancy maps of employees are scarce. And, vendors who really understand how to tap into the social and other Internet data sources well are scarcer still.Likewise, it seemed like every vendor discovered social computing in 2012. There were some alliances (e.g., Ultimate and Yammer). There were some added collaboration capabilities. And, there were a lot of integrations of social media with recruiting applications. Nowadays, it’s hard to find a recruiting or talent management vendor without an alliance to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Microsoft, for decades an iconic software company, now sees hardware as an indispensable part of its future.At Microsoft’s recent shareholders’ meeting, Ballmer made several comments indicating he now believes that breakthrough innovation leading to superior products and performance can be achieved by tightly coupling hardware and software development from the ground up—a concept Oracle refers to as “engineered systems.”From an informationweek.com article by Paul McDougall headlined Ballmer: Hardware Key to Microsoft’s Future:“And, not that we don’t have good hardware partners, but sometimes getting the innovation right across the seam of hardware and software is difficult unless you do both of them,” Ballmer said at the meeting, held Wednesday in Bellevue, Wash.Referring to the company’s new strategy of building its own Windows 8 tablets under the Surface brand, Ballmer said “maybe we should have done that earlier, maybe [Gates'] tablet would have shipped sooner.”Ballmer then left little doubt that Microsoft is no longer content to be solely reliant on third-party PC manufacturers for its success. “What we’ve said to ourselves now is that there is no boundary between hardware and software that we will let build up as a kind of innovation barrier.”Pretty powerful stuff from Ballmer, whose company has ridden its software-only strategy for almost 40 years to become one of the most successful corporations in the history of American business. His perspectives are worth another look—and remember, this is Microsoft we’re talking about.
“With increasing demands on digital investigation teams, we've seen a growing need for powerful, easy-to-use field solutions,” said Guidance Software President and CEO Victor Limongelli. “Features like the ability to preview data while it's being collected in the field can be of tremendous benefit to investigators.”EnCase Portable is EnCase digital investigations software that runs on a USB device to enable forensic professionals and non-experts alike to quickly and easily triage and collect vital data in a forensically sound and court-proven manner. EnCase Portable makes it possible for even new members of an investigations team to quickly review information stored on a computer in the field, in real-time, without altering or damaging the potential evidence collected.EnCase Portable V4 also provides two options for analyzing data acquired from running jobs. The first is the analysis option, which enables analysis from within a set of interlinking data browsers as well as drill-down into collected information. The advanced analysis option delivers EnCase Analytics functions. This release also makes it possible for field investigators to search metadata, dynamically add images to reports, and perform easier navigation and selection of hash sets.
Just when we thought it was over, the saga surrounding Canonical‘s controversial integration of Amazon.com search features into Ubuntu resurged this week as Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, denounced the feature as “spyware.” Depending on whether you think Stallman is a messianic visionary or a self-caricaturing embarrassment to the open source community, his thoughts may or may not sway your opinion. Either way, though, they highlight the huge challenges Canonical faces gaining user acceptance of its policies.In an essay published Friday, Stallman complained about a new feature, introduced with the release of Ubuntu 12.10 in October 2012, that displays results from Amazon.com when users search in the Dash of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop interface. Notably, in an indication that he was writing in his official capacity as founder and president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), his words appeared on its website, rather than on his personal site, where he often posts thoughts about a variety of timely issues.In addition to expressing concerns over Canonical’s collaboration with Amazon.com, a company which he believes “commits many wrongs,” Stallman complained in the essay about what he perceives as brazen violation of Ubuntu users’ privacy:Ubuntu uses the information about searches to show the user ads to buy various things from Amazon. Amazon commits many wrongs (see http://stallman.org/amazon.html); by promoting Amazon, Canonical contributes to them. However, the ads are not the core of the problem. The main issue is the spying. Canonical says it does not tell Amazon who searched for what. However, it is just as bad for Canonical to collect your personal information as it would have been for Amazon to collect it.
BACALAR, Mexico (AP) - Software company founder John McAfee said Sunday he wants to return to the United States and "settle down to whatever normal life" he can.In a live-stream Internet broadcast from the Guatemalan detention center where he is fighting a government order that he be returned to Belize, the 67-year-old said "I simply would like to live comfortably day by day, fish, swim, enjoy my declining years."Police in neighboring Belize want to question McAfee in the fatal shooting of a U.S. expatriate who lived near his home on a Belizean island in November.The creator of the McAfee antivirus program again denied involvement in the killing during the Sunday Internet video hook-up, during which he answered what he said were reporters' questions.His comments were sometimes contradictory. McAfee is an acknowledged practical joker who has dabbled in yoga, ultra-light aircraft and the production of herbal medications.The British-born McAfee first said that returning to the United States "is my only hope now." But he later added, "I would be happy to go to England, I have dual citizenship."He was emphatic that "I cannot ever return to Belize .... there is no hope for my life if I am ever returned to Belize."
Step one, monitor all the things. Step two, dedicate 90% of your analytics time and resources to analyzing data, deriving insights, and iterating on what metrics are being monitored and are being optimized. However, there is one small problem. Chances are, the amount of data produced by the instrumentation outpaces your ability to analyze, monitor, and correlate all the variations of the variables at play.This is where an anomaly detection algorithm, backed by a good statistical engine with access to the data can prove invaluable: it does not need to be perfect, but it should be able to alert you to significant outliers in the data. With the alert in hand, or in your mailbox, you can dig in and determine if more investigation is required.Good news, if you are using Google Analytics, then you already have a powerful anomaly detection engine at your disposal: Intelligence Events. Best of all, it can leverage all of your existing data, configured segments, and other customizations. And the price is right as well - it's free.In fact, with a little bit of work and customization, Intelligence Events can be easily configured to help you monitor the performance of your site! Visitors from India seeing a sudden spike in page load times? Now you have an automated tool which will help you spot the problem.
It’s incredibly exciting to see how the Web is evolving, and 2013 has a lot more in store. Over the next year, there are a number of technologies coming down the pipeline that have the potential to radically transform how we use and develop for the Web. CSS filters are already in Chrome and Safari, and allow advanced styling as as blurring, warping and modifying the color intensities of elements. However, that’s only the start of it. CSS Custom Filters let you write your own fragment and vertex shadows in GLSL, a language that has been integral to traditional 3D rendering over the past 10 years or so.What this means in practice, is that you can create incredible effects. Combined with CSS transitions you can produce beautiful transformations, from page curls, to folding elements. The limit is your imagination!So when can you use this? Adobe have been pioneering this technology, and Custom Filters are already available in Chrome under a flag. Expect to see them in Chrome early next year. For now, you can play with them in Canary.This API has the potential to radically transform signups and payments on the web. Autocomplete was designed to make it easer to fill out forms, and there’s even now a spec to hint inputs relate to which data.
is an engineer, architect, scientist, programmer, data analyst, evangelist, disruptor, investor, mentor, advisor, debater, father, biker and CTO @ Amazon.comAs engineers we are remarkably badly trained in thinking about cost. I don’t mean some big O order of magnitude cost but real dollar cost. You could given me five fault-tolerant algorithms and almost with my eyes closed I could pick the best one. But if you would then ask me what the difference would be in cost between the best and second-best when the system would start to scale I would falter. I learned how to incorporate cost into architecture the hard way. At Amazon.com the margins are, as in most retail, razor thin and as such any fluctuation in the cost of infrastructure and systems immediately eats into the bottom line. And Amazon.com has many moving pieces, with hundreds and hundreds of internal services, so keeping control over cost, architecturally, is just plain hard. Especially in the days before we have AWS, our cloud services.The most important concept is that, when you are growing, your cost should grow over the same dimension your revenue is coming in over. For Amazon.com that dimension is number of orders. If orders go up you cost should be allowed to rise as well. Although if you are architected well, you will be able to exploit economies of scale and your cost will rise less than the rise of your revenue. If you are architected correctly for cost-awareness scale becomes your friend.
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